Animals Issues Green@school Green@home
Green@Home

Building a sustainable home

A house that collects all its drinking water from rain, makes all its electricity from sunlight and recycles its own wastewater? Impossible! But that’s just what was achieved with this inner-Sydney house renovation.

When Michael Mobbs decided to renovate his inner-city home some years ago, he was concerned with air and water pollution. He wanted his children to grow up in a house with all the comforts of modern life, including a modern kitchen, plenty of hot water, and power to run hairdryers, washing machines and televisions. But without adding to air pollution by using electricity made from fossil fuels. Michael didn’t want to use any of the precious water stored in Sydney’s dams. He didn’t want to pollute Sydney Harbour with storm water. And he certainly didn’t want to pollute the Pacific Ocean with waste from the bathroom, laundry and kitchen.

Click to read the rest of the story >>

 

  

Urban gardens

Keen to help conserve local wildlife but not exactly sure what you can do? Why not take action and create your own suburban native garden!

In many urban areas, the under-storey plants and ground flora have been cleared for parks, waterways and other open spaces and old trees with nesting hollows have been taken over by introduced bird species, creating a habitat gap. All these plants are important in the lifecycle of many animals as they provide food, shelter and breeding sites.

Creating native gardens in urban areas is a great way to help bridge the habitat gap. The main things needed to create a habitat that will attract local wildlife are native plants and a quiet area free from frequent disturbance. Mowing lawns and clipping hedges can disturb animals, particularly birds, and may cause them to move to another area.

Click to read the rest of the story >>

 

  

Recycling – is it worth it?

You awake to the rumbling of a truck. It stops at your front kerb. There’s silence for a moment and then a series of clangs and clunks as your jam jars, soup tins, plastic milk containers and soft drink bottles are emptied into the truck. The truck drones on down the street, stopping every five metres to repeat the process. You roll over and try to go back to sleep but something is bothering you. Is sorting the recyclables from your rubbish really making any difference? It could be a huge conspiracy to make us tidy up, rinsing and flattening milk cartons, bundling newspapers and squashing plastic juice bottles! Is someone from Funniest Home Videos zooming in on the rinsing, bundling and stomping of the recycling ritual? Regardless, 97 per cent of Australian households take part in this ritual every week. Is recycling worth the effort?

Click to read the rest of the story >>

 

  

Message in a bottle

After you slam down your next fizzy drink, stop and think before you throw the plastic bottle in the nearest recycling bin. I’m not trying to encourage you to be environmentally irresponsible, I just want you to try an experiment with the bottle! You’ll be able to recycle it later.

Before we get stuck into the experiment, you might be interested to know that many plastic bottles are made from a plastic called polyethylene terephthalate. Try getting your lips around that! Fortunately, it’s much easier getting them around an actual bottle. Due to its complicated name, this plastic has been given a much simpler nickname – PET.

Click to read the rest of the story >>

 

  

6 things you can do!

1. Become a soil monitor!

Biodiversity is not just limited to the animals and plants found in the wild. In fact the bulk of biomass (living matter) is right under our feet—in the soil. So even if you only have a square metre of dirt in the backyard you can still do a lot to look after the life living in it. By mulching, keeping the ground moist and planting natives you will attract small insects and butterflies to feed and live in your garden, which all contributes to local biodiversity. So look after your soil and you might just discover some unusual creepy crawly critters living alongside you!

Click to read the rest of the story >>

 

  

Water savers unite

How much water do you think your family uses on an average day?
Go on, guess. Think about it as bath tubs – how many bath tubs of water do you think your family uses in showering, washing clothes, cooking, in the garden, and for all those other things where we splash the wet stuff around? Two? Three? Well, according to Yarra Valley Water, who supply water to 1.5 million people in Melbourne, if you’re an average family – that’s two of the big people and two of the smaller ones – you probably use around 4.5 bath tubs of water a day. That’s FULL baths. That’s around 700 litres a day. Every day.

Click to read the rest of the story >>